I get that side of it. But it seems to dismiss the listeners that don't care for any of that. The jist seems to be that they want to deliberately lower pay outs for older stuff even if it's played a lot.

There must be a niche for artists who record so rarely that each of their albums is accompanied by a 10000-word thinkpiece in the New Yorker.

This is basically Tool, as someone else pointed out in this thread, but it’s not a reliable or sustainable model for 99.9999% of artists.

This only works as long as everybody else isn't doing it.

That’s objectively untrue, because in the music industry today, everybody is doing this.